


Black Eye

by thoughtsappear



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Mass Effect 1, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 12:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2580698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thoughtsappear/pseuds/thoughtsappear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if female krogan weren't the only ones who find scars attractive?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Eye

Humans were strange creatures, Wrex thought.

They honored a variety of inconsistent ancestors, their hand to hand combat had not nearly enough head butting and their food suffered from a severe lack of pyjack meat.

Plus, their standards of beauty were ridiculous.

Take Shepard, for example. From the conversations she had with other human females, Wrex gathered that she was not considered an attractive woman.

She was too tall, she lamented to Williams. Her muscles were too big. She was too bossy. Men didn't like a woman who could out shoot them and then drink them under the table.

Wrex found it funny that she worried about being attractive to human males, when it seemed she already had one that found her quite alluring. Alenko practically dripped with pheromones whenever she came around. She was sturdy, intimidating, and had shown great tenacity on the battlefield. As a krogan she would be flooded with mating requests.

She came back from a mission with T’Soni and Vakarian covered in blood, her hair matted with dirt and carnage. Her armor was dented and she was sporting the most beautiful swollen purple bruise over her right eye.

A black eye, she had called it. The name perplexed him. Her eye wasn't black at all. Another strange human custom of using words inconsistently and without regard for their actual meaning.

He watched as Shepard’s eye bruise turned all sorts of unusual colors as it healed. Purple, blue, green, even a sickly yellow. Why did it take so long for a such a strong human to heal herself, he wondered.

Humans and their fragile, fleshy bodies, their skin bruising and turning colors, bones breaking so easily. How did they even survive so many battles if they bled so much and their bodies were so slowly repaired?

==

They were on Noveria fighting geth, and it must have been the cold because Wrex was never caught off guard. A geth rocket trooper knocked him off his feet and a second machine took down his shield before he could recover his shotgun. The next blast ripped through his armor and penetrated his hide on the left side, leaving a shallow tear. The rocket trooper fired again, and Wrex braced himself for impact.

Shepard pulled him out of the geth’s fire, but caught the tail end of the blast herself. She crawled next to him, dazed but not deterred, her head bleeding from a scrape at her scalp, and her right cheek gaping open from where she caught shrapnel in an earlier attack. Her face was covered in streaks of her red, almost black human blood, only sweat running down her forehead to wash away the sticky mess. He could see a bruise forming on her left brow.

This is what krogan goddesses must have looked like, he thought, as she tried to slap some medi-gel on his wound. Instead he shook her off and rose to his feet, feeling the blood rage fill him. Shepard covered him as he picked off the remaining geth and then they both collapsed into the snow to rest for a moment.

==

Later when they returned to the Normandy, Shepard ordered the entire ground team to visit the med bay and be checked out. He obeyed without objection. Shepard was also as stubborn as a krogan.

Dr. Chakwas agreed that he was fine, but she insisted he stay there a little longer. Wrex grumbled and settled back down on his cot. He suspected the good doctor wanted to study a fine krogan specimen such as himself.

Shepard came to debrief him as a proper battlemaster would. Her face was clear now, the blood wiped clean, but he could still see the bruises on her brow, the old blood in her hair and the angry gash on her cheek barely covered by a bandage.

Her old black eye was gone, but she’d probably have worse from this fight in the morning, he could already tell.

Chakwas turned her attention to the commander and demanded that she sit down and allow the doctor to treat her and stitch up her wounds.

You’ll be lucky if it doesn't scar, she told Shepard, already holding the Commander’s face still to examine the injury closely.

Wrex clutched at his chest and sighed. He could already picture her face with a scar slashing one cheek.

If only, he thought. _Be still my hearts._


End file.
